The FSFE's goal is to ensure that the owners of IT devices are alwaysin fulland sole control of them. This fundamental principle is recently beingchallenged. For maintaining sustained growth in the development and use ofsoftware, the broad availability of general purpose computers is crucial. Thismonth the FSFE published its"Secure Boot" analysis.

We demand that before purchasing a device, buyers must be informed conciselyabout the technical measures implemented in this device, as well as thespecific usage restrictions and their consequences for the owner.

Furthermore, we strongly recommend to exclusively purchase IT devices whichgrant their owners full, sole and permanent control over security subsystems(e. g. signature-based usage restrictions), in order to maintain the ability toinstall arbitrary software and lastly to retain exclusive control over ones owndata.

European Court of Justice confirms: We are right!

We always said "They are willing to deal with everybody, but those whocompete with them." Meaning, proposing conditions against Free Software is anabuse. Microsoft replied "change your business model to suit our licensingscheme and you'll be served", or "Free what? Who the hell are you, what'syour turnover", or dismissals like this. Apart from annoying, they werewrong. (Carlo Piana, who representedthe FSFE and the Samba Team)

This month the European Court of Justice has ordered Microsoft to finallypay a record fine of 860 million euros for using its near-monopoly on thedesktop to keep rivals out of the workgroup server market.

Microsoft spent over 3.000.000.000 EUR to buy third parties out of this case. But for a decade, wecontinued to participate in the case, to assert the rights of Free Softwaredevelopers to access interoperability information, especially for the SambaTeam. Samba is a Free Software to share files and printers in a networkcompeting with Microsoft's proprietary product.

This decision establishesthat we were right: Receiving the interoperability information was our right asFree Software community, not a concession by Microsoft.

Spain won the Championship! What about Finland?

Interesting times in the European Free Software Championship. Spainwon the European Free Software Championship with 4:3 against Norway.Thanks to referee Guido Arnoldwe didnot receive any reports of fouls during the alternative games. Outside thosegames the FSFE also works on fairness.

We have started an initiative to advance fair public procurements inFinland, to lower the barrier for Free Software in the Finnish public sector.The initiative concentrates on IT related procurement notices that requirebrand instead of defining functionality required by the procurer. To date theFSFE has skimmed over 300 procurement notices, and of those taken into closeranalysis, 14 have been found to clearly violate the Finnish procurement law.These violating notices explicitly asked for tenders of specific brands ofsoftware manufacturers or products and thus discriminate all other brands andmanufacturers, effectively stopping free competition.

The FSFE contacts the violating authorities and informs them about thespecific violation the notice contains, including a six item list ofrecommendations to ensure proper competition.

Something completely different

The FSFE's former legal coordinator Shane Coughlan launchedOpenRelief. The project is aimed at developinginexpensive—"disposable"—drone aircraft to assist relief teams indetectingpeople, changes in terrain, smoke, radiation, and other conditions in placesthat may be difficult or dangerous for on-the-ground exploration.

Aftermeeting other Fellows at Linuxtag in Berlin, Heiki Ojasild decided tohold a PDFreaders sprint at Akademy inTallinn, Estonia. On July 4theveryone is invited to follow our PDF Readers SprintGuide stopping public bodies from restricting the users' freedom andunfairly distorting the competition in favour of certain proprietary softwaremakers.

The FSFE's president KarstenGerloff welcomes the Basque Country's move to introduce a policy thatsoftware developed with public funds will be released as Free Software bydefault.

The draft for the UK Communications Bill outlines how civil servants areintent on surveilling the internet communications of British citizens. Sam Tuke wrote about how to useFree Software to protect your privacy online, regardless of the measures thatthe Coalition may impose upon you or your telecoms providers.

UPDATE: The European Parliament rejectedACTA. (04/07/2012)The FSFE has been askingactivists across Europe to protest against the Anti-CounterfeitingTrade Agreement (ACTA). Our aim is that the European Parliament finallyrejects this controversial treaty, which would greatly harm citizens'rights. The Parliament will hold a plenary vote on ACTA on 4th of July.

A bit sarcastic: some people are wonderingwho was violating the GNU GPL with StuxNet.

And in the upcoming month, the FSFE will be present at the RMLL (Libre Software Meeting) in Geneva,and as you can see on our event pageRichard Stallman is giving talks in the Czech Republic, Germany, andSpain.

A selection from the Fellowship blogaggregation:

Fellowship representativeHugo Roy commented on Facebook's updates of the terms of service(that is the document most people never read, but everyone agrees to whenthey sign up to services online).

A Federal US Judge says APIs are not copyrightable. Read more in Carlo Piana's article, and learn whycopyright in software is not the same copyright as the one granted toliterary works.

Hannes Hauswedell wrote a triology (part0 part1, and part2) about a versatile, open and future-proof audio setup.

And finally, read why it might somtimes be complicated toreally "try turning it off and on again"?.

Get Active: Whom should we ask next?

Every time your editor reads a Fellowship interviewhe feels proud to work for the FSFE with all those amazing people. Againthis monthwhen Bjarni RunarEinarsson was interviewed about PageKite, an application whichallows the publication of websites stored on personal computers. PageKite can be combined with other FreeSoftware to realise decentralisation.

Please help Chris Woolfrey and SamTuke by suggesting other Fellowsfor an interview. You can also participate in our editors team to helpinterviewing people and editing other publications. And finally, if you knowinteresting people in the Free Software community who are not yet Fellows (itis hard to believe, but your editor heard rumours they still exist), convincethem to become a Fellow, so we can make new interesting interviews foryou.